It turns out it's a lot cheaper to just tell a real person to do something different in real time a bunch of times over the course of a day then it is to tell animators to animate a bunch of CGI people differently a bunch of times.
Extras don't get paid that much to begin with (a fixed, flat rate which varies depending on the type of production i.e., commercial vs TV vs movie). Digital artists don't get paid all that much either, but the disparity is large enough that you actually lose money (compared to hiring a real-person extra) if you need to re-animate a CGI extra more than once. And quite frankly, given the limited VFX budgets most productions have to work with, it's better to spend the VFX budget on actual visual effects than on background filler. Otherwise, you end up with Dr Strange 2, Secret Invasion, and the Book of Boba Fett...
After all, people were saying that robots would talk like humans and be indistinguishable from sentient life before you or I were ever born.
Decades later, even with CPUs with more than 1,000,000,000,000x the processing power it's still news when a company releases a robot that can walk in a straight line without falling over, which is something that human babies can do before they're able to figure out how to control their own bowel functions.
"Generative AI is going to replace actors."
"Well actually productions are moving back to actors because they are cheaper than digital artists."
Yes. And guess what else is going to be cheaper than both actors and digital artists?
An extra costs $100-$1000. A digital artist's time costs about twice that. A license for a generative AI image will cost at least 4x what it costs to pay the extra, and that's not including the subscription you'll need to pay to access the AI service.
Of course, they could get non-actor real people to consent and sign contracts, and then the AIs wouldn't forget their lines.
The Hollywood writers got major protections against AI exploitation in their new deal, and surely SAG will follow with their own version. Hollywood can’t exist without its writers or actors and they’ve made it clear to the executive class that they will not take these changes lying down.
People are going to be building this stuff at their kitchen table.
YouTube just surpassed Netflix with teens...no one needs McCorp to make content now and even less so in the future
How does a union contract stop me from making something at my kitchen table?
The union contract is between some Corp and their employees
The Hollywood strikes seem rooted in 1985...no one needs Hollywood to make or consume content anymore
There will definitely be a role for fully AI characters when the technology gets there (people love vtubers and vocaloids already!) but I doubt they would ever really replace human performers.
Taylor Swift is a generated personality designed by a branding and marketing company.
People don’t care if there is a human portraying the character or a team of artists.
sure - you can suggest that Taylor is the product of branding/marketing. its cynical and somewhat true. but aside from that, she's an artist. in the deepest meaning of the word.
people are not going to resonate with a generative ai. instead - people will continue to resonate with actual art and artists expressing actual feelings
They _want_ that. But they rarely have that. I argue most if not all music artists in particular, are "fake" already, in the sense that, like you say, branding+marketing, and scripted stunts and controversies, etc. People are already fooled by this in today's age. I think there might be pushback, but I think in the end people will accept/be fooled by ai generated artists.
really though? Look at Britney Spears or Shia LaBeouf. They have very "authentic" personalities, but society rejects them.
Then you have people like Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, or Johnny Depp paying for branding agencies and people love them.
Interesting. When did she turn from an actual person into a generated personality, and how? And why can't we get more of them on tour to lower the ticket prices?
I'd imagine the moment she signed a deal with a record label, they hired a company to help manage her brand/PR.
There’s ZERO evidence of that right now and little reason to expect it.
What’s dramatically more likely is that generative AI will be an incredible new medium, disrupting current arts and reshaping almost all art markets the way photography and sound recording each did a few. And its disruption applies to film, illustration, music, coding, writing, etc
That’s no small achievement and its an exciting thing to witness, but it’s not the same as replacing the arts that already exist. Arts have shown themselves to be cockroaches, that simply adapt themselves around these sorts of disruptions.
There will still be HUGE markets for human (and hybrid) arts even as they are smaller and differently shaped than what we saw in the 20th century.
there's one huge reason to expect this: it's cheaper than real people (no salary, no royalties)
only looks expensive because it's new. but it won't stay expensive because it's all software so it has zero cost of distribution (given the internet)
> And its disruption applies to film, illustration, music, coding, writing, etc
just keep going, this stuff will disrupt THE LAW. the foundation of civilized society as we know it!!!
this goes beyond markets, markets are based upon the law!!!
I do agree that soon we'll have best movies with human actors, best movies with some AI actors, best movies with all AI actors. And then the academy will resist movies with AI actors, then maybe have a special category before they give up because all the movies have them.
Or imagine there's a presidential election and one candidate wants to take down the other. So they buy your psychological profile from some data broker, then create a deep fake video of the candidate reading a speech tailored to make you dislike them.
You don't even have to go so large scale. Imagine you're a teenager and you're mad because someone else is making moves on the person you fancy. So you decide to create a video of this love rival kicking a dog outside the school and upload it to Youtube under a fake account and then spread it round the school.
It will get to the point where you cannot trust anything you see on the internet anymore. Laws are absolutely going to have to be created and rewritten to take into account this new reality. I strongly suspect all social media accounts will need to be tied to ID numbers like passports or social security at some point within the next 20 years.
Er no. That poor kid might end up getting socially shunned at best and lynch mobbed and killed at worst. I'd say that's pretty fucking consequential. And that's just one example of an infinite amount of scenarios. Every "big" event is just an aggregation of many individual stories.
> and you don’t need AI for either.
You are massively underestimating the scale of change. In the past you would have needed an entire team working many hours to create one short video of high enough quality to fool people. Now anyone, anywhere, will be able to create them in an instant. Not only that, they will be able to create videos tailored to an individual and delivered to them for maximum effect. That is 100% only enabled by AI.
> You could do all that a century ago
Television wasn't even invented a century ago. You could make up some fake story and put it in the newspaper, but people trust their eyes more than words, and they're also moved to action by them more as well.
And no, a government absolutely could not run any kind of deception campaign in 1923 anywhere close to what they will be able to when this is perfected. A motivated sole individual with a bit of capital to spare, let alone a government, will be able to run a deception campaign thousands of times more effective than any 1920s trickster's wildest dreams.
I really do believe this. software will eventually change the very nature of human language and hence of human thought
I picked up this line of thought from an academic Walter J. Ong who wrote a book "Orality and literacy" in which he argues that literacy (written word) changed how we think.
so I just extend that reasoning. I think that software constitutes a larger change in humanity's thought than the printing press; but that's like my opinion man
An operator can push this pretty far with elaborate and carefully designed inputs, but the system is always going to be gravitating towards the patterns it represents most well.
When you or I look at our first bunch of outputs, we don’t immediately pick up on the nodes it likes to gravitate towards because there are many many of them, and we meed more of our own training data to become better discriminators.
But as these tools become ubiquitous, people will start to get to get this inkling sense of when something feels a little AI-ish. You can already see people do that with ChatGPT and SD/Midjourney output that wasn’t carefully produced. You probably do it yourself.
So far, there’s no real way to conceive of these technologies as not being subject to that kind of signature.
Like you and me, they’re still capable of incredible variety, but also like you and me, each model will have its own signature that can be more or less discerned.
For the arts, that kind of signature means that there will be a continued attention to human artists alongside these systems, because they all bring their own recognizable qualities and aesthetics.
To make better art. I've seen most of the films in that list are they're incredible films that stick with me and give me a sense of awe today. Watching 1000s of real life people in a scene just creates a sense of spectacle that is just not achievable with current CGI - the brain is just not fooled or impressed like it is when you watch those old films and see the amount of work and effort that must have gone into them. Sergio Morricone hired the Spanish army to build the cemetery at the end of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and it took them several days to make. Nowadays it just takes someone a few clicks of a mouse but it fucking shows as well. Maybe with AI we'll actually get to a point where the brain can be tricked because it gets the lighting right, but at the minute it just doesn't and the films are worse because of it.
Just look at how incredible this location is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpVaoA8RfIk
It's even more awesome when you watch the film in it's totality because it builds up slowly, with bigger and bigger scenarios until it culminates with this.
And even in potato cam resolution, how impressive is this scene from Cleopatra:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_rLwuVP9Zw
They just hit different when they're actually real.
What's hilarious is that the execs still don't fucking see it. Christopher Nolan is one of the only ones out there still pushing for practical effects and he rakes in the money at the box office more consistently than just about any other director other than Cameron or Spielberg. It's because the films are actually worth watching. Before Oppenheimer, what was the last big film? Top Gun, which also used a ton of real life flight footage.
If I want to watch an animation, I'll watch an actual, awesome animation that takes full advantage of the medium like Into The Spiderverse or something from Studio Ghibli. If I want to watch a movie, I want to watch a real flesh and guts movie. Yet 99% of the stuff Hollywood puts out is some weird hybrid shit that is the worst of all worlds.
If Hollywood starts making better art, people will start going back to the movies. But they've got greedy. In any other industry, if you made a product, and you got 100% more for it than what it cost to produce you'd consider that a success. But these arseholes don't. They want 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x and they want to milk it for all it's worth and turn it into a fucking "universe" until it just collapses into a heap of shit and no-one even remembers why they liked the original.
Christopher Nolan can afford extreme artistic choices like not showing ads or previews before Oppenheimer. That's such a rarity that I wouldn't make any extrapolations even in today's world. Betting that gen AI will result in an alternative type of art and not just replace multiple roles and production techniques in existing industries is not something I can see happening considering that professional art is business.
E.g. we didn't see CGI creating an alternative movie industry that exists in parallel to non-CGI movies. CGI is used by everyone, including artsy independent creators.
I will forever love Studio Ghibli animation. But if in the future the same level of expression can be achieved with CGI/gen AI - I just fail to see them not switching their tools (possibly in the post-Miyazaki world).
> What's hilarious is that the execs still don't fucking see it
Why would they? Very few people can notice and appreciate the level of detail you are describing. And I am not even sure we will never be able to replicate it computationally. In 10-20... 50 years? Don't see why not.
> Why would they? Very few people can notice and appreciate the level of detail you are describing
People might not consciously appreciate the detail but I think almost everyone subconsciously appreciates the overall vibe. Everyone can watch that The Good, The Bad and The Ugly clip and see there's something special about that location.
The reason I feel like the execs should be able to see it is that they're cutting off their nose to spite their face. If you watch a movie and come out seeing like you've seen something breathtaking, you're going to tell your friends and ticket sales are going to go up, not just for that movie, but for future movies as well. Whereas if film after film after film is a dud, which seems to be more common for me than not nowadays, you stop watching films and spending your money on films. For me this has already happened - when I was younger I used to go to the cinema once every week or two. The state of cinema is so bad now I might only go once a quarter.
So the execs take these cost cutting measures, but they have the overall effect of losing them money in the long term. The film may end up pulling in 200% over production compared to 100% if they'd have used practical effects. But that "missing profit" isn't missing - they're instead spending it on raising their overall brand value and reputation by offering up a higher quality product.
Like the last film I watched at the cinema was Gareth Edwards The Creator. He'd built up a little bit of brand value with the original Monsters and Rogue One, but The Creator was so monumentally, insultingly bad I don't think I will ever go watch a film he's made again.